| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| 900 Feet Up With Nowhere to Go but Down |
| 2008-03-16 |
| video at link MOAB, Utah — He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van. This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the world’s best climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash tethered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall. At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Richards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope — a strand of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and coppery green — he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure sports of highlining and BASE-jumping. He was also taking another stride toward his longing for avian flight, not as a birdman in a nylon wing suit or squirrel suit, which he had tried, but as a soloist who could jump off a cliff in a way that he did not yet understand, with a strength and concentration that he did not yet possess, and simply fly. Trance music pulsed from speakers on the canyon ledge with knowing lyrics: “Sometimes I think my dreams are wild.” ------- Potter, an Army brat who grew up in New Hampshire, began slacklining in 1993 under the tutelage of a Yosemite character named Chongo, famous among climbers for his itinerant lifestyle and his obsessive musings on theoretical physics. On his Web site, chongonation.com, Chongo warned that even for rock-climbing experts and extreme sport professionals, a misstep while highlining could result in serious Newtonian consequences of action and equal and opposite reaction. Last Thursday at Hell Roaring Canyon, Potter believed he was finally ready to walk the 180-foot rope while tethered to a leash around his waist. During a couple weeks of rehearsal, he had felt exposed on the rope, with a touch of vertigo. A parabola of sandstone curved off to his right, never more than 60 feet away. To his left, the gorge yawned a half-mile wide. Straight ahead, the rope was anchored to a narrow promontory that seemed to hover, drawing his vision a mile down the canyon. “When I get in the middle, an emptiness takes over,” Potter said. “I felt a little helpless.” |
| Posted by:eltoroverde |